There are a few wireless kinks to work out, so I haven’t taken the plunge yet, but I do have a small accessory that plugs into the bottom of the iPod and makes it work flawlessly with Airpods and car stereos. (All for pretty reasonable prices at that!) There are even people right now who are working to make iPods Bluetooth compatible. He could mod them with up to 2 terabytes of fast storage and put in giant batteries that lasted a week. I wound up on Etsy, where a shop run by a nice guy named Jim called PiratePTiPods sold custom-made iPods in different colors. Before long, my old beat-up eBay purchase with its slow hard-drive and feeble battery just didn’t seem like enough. I came across DankPods, an entertaining YouTuber who somehow modded his iPod to have more storage space than my 2019 MacBook Pro. These days there’s a whole iPod community on Reddit devoted to refurbs and customs, and soon enough I was hooked. I was far less likely to bounce off an album after buying it, and in the process I ended up discovering deep cuts that I would have missed had I fired up Spotify. Beyond the economic reasons, it feels good to purchase music (digital album sales are still not great for artists, but they’re worlds better than the percentage of a penny artists make per stream) and it also makes you feel more connected to your purchase. I felt like I was back at Tower Records or Kim’s or Other Music in the village. I’d have iTunes open in one window and YouTube open in another just so I could sample albums before deciding whether or not to buy them. I figured out how to disconnect Apple Music from my library to give me that old school iTunes experience (the key is turning off iCloud Music), and then found myself browsing the store for hours. Things slowed down, and I started to write down notes of albums I wanted to buy when I got home. (Maybe a few skips.) Unlike my phone, I didn’t feel the need to bounce from song to podcast to YouTube video to NBA highlights on Twitter.Īnd a funny thing happened when the iPod became my primary form of engaging with music. (I know.) Part of that had to do with the “inconvenience” of using it: Loading music is a whole process, and so, when faced with an active choice, I found myself listening to full albums front to back. There’s just too much shit to choose from! Listening to something on the iPod, on the other hand, felt intentional-sort of like putting on a record. Sure, Spotify and Apple Music give you access to millions of songs whenever you want, but a buffet of infinite choices that seems appetizing in the abstract can in reality feel paralyzing. That might sound obvious, maybe even trite, but after a decade of listening to music on smartphones, it felt refreshing to focus on one thing at a time again-to have a sense of containment. The first thing you have to know about listening to music on an iPod is that your primary action is always listening to music. I ejected it from my computer, threw on some headphones, and fell backwards into bed and in time. Soon I was able to get a few thousand songs onto this beat-up little gray rectangle. It was a bit of a headache to get the iPod up and running, but after I found the “purchase history” section of the iTunes Store, things started to come together. I clicked “buy” and the iPod arrived about a week later.įiring it up made me realize how much music, and the way we listen to it, had changed since I last had one of these guys in the mid-2000s. The sight instantly filled me with that familiar mixture of joy and nostalgia that BuzzFeed spent the last decade weaponizing for traffic. One night, I found myself clicking around on eBay when a heavily used iPod caught my eye. I was lonely, and my preferred method for dealing with that loneliness was shopping online for shit that I didn’t need. Last year, I spent five months in New York working on a TV show.
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